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A Grand Day Out: Empathic Approaches to Design

This paper was delivered at The 10th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education, organised by the Escola Tecnica Superior d' Eninyera Industrial de Barcelona (ETSEIB), Universitaat Politechnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, in participation with the Design Education Special Interest Group (DESIGN) of the Design Society and the Institute of Engineering Designers (IED). The E&PDE conference provides a forum for educators and researchers from product design together with industry and government representatives to discuss current educational issues and the nature of design education in the future.

The research described in the paper is based on collaborative work undertaken with Dr Deana McDonagh (co-author) from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). The collaborative research was funded by a grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh under their International Academic Exchange Programme. Malins contribution to this research was in exploring observational methods used to undertake research in the field for example observing shortcomings in public transport, looking for opportunities for barrier free design to introduce design improvements which avoid stigmatizing the disabled as a special group. The research anticipates a shift towards a more ethnographic approach to designing and towards service design thinking and its inclusion as an educational priority. The paper argues that new approaches are required to educate designers to ensure they have an empathic understanding of end-users’ needs, especially individuals with some form of impairment. It anticipates the growing emphasis on participatory research methods and visual methods supported by IT. The methodological approach referred to in the paper was further developed by the c4ci project, which was established in 2008 (See Case Study 2 – Collaborative Design for Business Innovation) which emphasised the need for human-centred approaches and the use of observational methods for identifying design problems and recognising opportunities for design innovation.